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Sunday, March 2, 2008
Morrow has made his mark
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Anthony Morrow remembers the shot that would have evened the 2005 ACC championship game against Duke. Top of the key, 40 seconds left. He’d just made a 3-pointer a minute earlier, and the way Morrow rose and delivered this one made a guy sitting courtside say to himself, “Tie game.”
Morrow thought he’d made it, too. Alas, the ball, he recalled, “went a little long.” And Will Bynum climbed Shelden Williams’ back for an offensive rebound that set off a careening sequence that wound up with Morrow making a two-pointer from the lane that would leave Georgia Tech one point short with 25 seconds to go. Then Jarrett Jack was whistled for the infamous phantom foul on J.J. Redick, and the Jackets wound up losing 69-64.
Morrow was a freshman then, and from a big-picture standpoint you could say nothing about Tech basketball has been as good since that frazzled day in Washington. Those Jackets would be eliminated from the NCAA tournament by Louisville one week hence, and here it is 2008 and Tech hasn’t won a postseason game of any kind — NCAA, NIT or ACC — since 2005.
“There have been certain situations I don’t want to go into too deep,” Morrow said Saturday, speaking after Tech had won its first game in 3-1/2 weeks. (Presumably he meant the early departures of Thaddeus Young and Javaris Crittenton to the NBA.) “But guys like Jarrett Jack and Will Bynum [upperclassmen who led Tech to the 2004 NCAA championship game] set the standard really high.
“My sophomore year [the Jackets were 11-17] was kind of rough, but we got back to the NCAA last year. So I don’t think things have gone backward.”
Tech needs to sweep three games in the regular season’s final week just to reach .500. Morrow believes the Jackets can play their way into the Big Dance — “Definitely,” he said — but realistically they would have to win the ACC tournament to do it.
As deflating as the past three seasons might have been — Tech is 43-44 since Jack and Bynum and their accomplished group left — there has been one reason to smile. Morrow came here as a standstill shooter and will leave as something more. He should exit as one of the top 20 scorers in school history, and he’ll have gotten there on the strength of more than just a sweet stroke.
After his freshman season, Morrow recalls coach Paul Hewitt saying, “You’re just a catch-and-shoot guy.” And he was. But he isn’t now. He can score off the dribble, and he can even post up.
“Some guys might not have taken that the right way,” Morrow said, speaking of Hewitt’s apt critique, but this guy did. Hewitt and his assistants helped, but Morrow attributes most of his improvement to a time-honored concept. “It’s definitely hard work. It’s coming out to pickup games and telling yourself, ‘Today I’m going to work on posting up.’ It’s setting up the chairs and using the heavy ball to work on dribbling.”
Four years after he arrived — a bit in awe of Jack and Bynum and the rest, truth to tell — Morrow is Tech’s leading scorer and only consistent offensive option. He scored 22 points on only 12 shots in the Jackets’ overtime defeat of Wake Forest on Saturday, and if that modest victory was required to break a five-game losing streak … well, so be it.
“That’s just part of the game,” he said. “The ACC is one of the biggest conferences in the history of college basketball, and you’re going to have ups and downs. It’s all about who wants to do something about it at the end of games. That’s what makes it so much fun.”
Often we on the periphery get caught up in wins and losses and RPIs, and we lose sight of a basic underpinning: College basketball is fun. If Tech basketball isn’t what it was when Anthony Morrow enrolled, that doesn’t mean his four years have gone for naught. Indeed, he said, “This has been the best time of my life.”
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